that's when you need a clinometer.

Getting GPS and communications coverage in hilly terrain in New Zealand can be problematic. Our position on the globe means that satellites, particularly geostationary communication satellites, appear low on the horizon, especially in the deep south.

Vicinity Solutions recently sponsored the purchase of a Suunto Combined Compass Clinometer for the St John mobile command unit, seen here at a recent event near Queenstown.

Using the TANDEM-360PC/360R means much greater efficiency in selecting the optimal location to place the vehicle and set up the communications.

Would this technology be useful to you or your clients?

We've long held the view that information isn't information unless it's simple and highlights clearly to the user what decision needs to be made. Recent developments in information technology are moving in sync with our perspective, namely, the rise of apps being developed for smartphones and tablets.

Here's why. The smaller format screens have forced developers to become more careful about what they show and how much stuff they try and get the application to do.

Reducing the scope of the app means that it is simpler, and also means the developer has to think more clearly about what they want to deliver and how they want it to operate. This makes it easier to use, and the ease of use and small scope translates to more widgets sold at a much lower price.

The other trend to emerge is interface integration. In just 4 years the state of the art application integration using Service Oriented Architecture, where applications communicated and co-ordinated transactions between them using messages, has given way to interface integration where interfaces communicate with each other. Yes, they still use services, but in a much more componentised way. These apps have become single purpose, doing one thing well.

Small focused apps equal shorter development time, lower development cost, and quicker return on investment. Or if worst comes to worst and the project doesn't come to pass, the losses are smaller and quicker and there is less sunk investment. These more focused apps suit agile development methods and the finished products are the result of tightly constructed 'user stories' which define the functional requirements.

To put this into context for our industry, the days of an all-singing, all-dancing map with configurable layers that can be turned on and off could well be a thing of the past. Maps are sometimes difficult for some users to comprehend and often have unintuitive navigation which requires thought on deployment. What's more, only 2% of users ever change the default settings, and rarely are more than 10% of the features provided ever used. That is a lot of development effort for no return.

What that means is that maps need to be very simple and clear, because like we said, information isn't information unless it's simple . . .

It will be fascinating to see where this technology heads next.

Bryan has had reason to think about this recently, as he was asked to exhibit paintings at the 'Art et Fare' gallery in Akaroa earlier this year.

SIMILARITY #1 - HARD WORK AND DEADLINES

The task at hand was no small matter. Producing three gallery quality paintings in eight weeks would have been a reasonably tall order for a full time artist, so fitting it around his career and business was both a challenge and a labour of love. Bryan got stuck in by getting up around 5am and painting for two hours each morning before starting work, then painting for 5-6 hours each evening, and pretty much all weekend from early morning to late at night.

The three paintings took approximately 450 hours to complete, but the stunning end result was worth the effort.

SIMILARITY #2 - SEEING SOMETHING FROM A VIEWER'S OR CUSTOMER'S PERSPECTIVE

Putting your creation out in the world takes courage, because as Bryan acknowledges, 'the public don't hold back if they can't connect with the art, and I can be as cutting as the next person.' It's important to be true to your own vision, but forget the end user or viewer at your peril. They will let you know what they think, and they will notice if they've been forgotten.

SIMILARITY #3 - PATTERNED THINKING

Artists will get nowhere by simply representing isolated information out of context or lacking meaning. To see patterns is to see the bigger picture and to derive meaning and usefulness from apparently disconnected facts.

It's one of the secrets of good art, and a key component of good consulting.

There are several competing strategies at play, so let's compare Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services with Google, for example.

OGC wants the community to generate and agree on a model (called a schema) that all data being shared will be transformed to fit and they want the data to be in a format that supports sharing live data in real time across the web and may even be transactional. They are not invested in the ESRI's, Intergraph's and MapInfo's of the world as the structures are software-agnostic (although they do need these companies to support their ideas to produce and consume the data services). Load CityGML data from New York and it should match CityGML data from Wellington.

It's been estimated that not sharing data in NZ is costing the economy $500 million a year.

The OGC Web Services approach is careful, planned and requires a screed of metadata to be captured according to one of the metadata standards and stored in a database where it can be harvested via a CWS (the OpenGIS Catalogue Service). Then you need to publish your spatial data via one of the other services (WMS or WFS) and if it is a snapshot then you may need to republish the snapshot on a regular basis, say nightly, as well.

Of course, as they say, no man is an island, so chances are someone will be interested in someone else's data as well as yours and want to see them both together. Equally it may be you who is interested in in the other party's data. In this case, you are going to have to determine a common data model, and publish this as a schema. A vocabulary can be developed which essentially translates the different data models to a common one. You might also have to develop a web portal so people can view all this data together in one place. If the community is a large one, you are probably going to have to get together to hammer out a consensus on a schema with a group of people with different priorities, motivations and ideas.

And because each record is delivered via a schema, each record includes all of the metadata of the schema, so large datasets may be slow-loading. Submitting a bounding rectangle or storing a copy of a large dataset offline seem to be the quick fixes.

The other emerging force is the Google way. And it sounds so tempting. You just put your stuff out there. You don't have to worry about data structures. Google will throw some mega-grunt machine learning at the problem and sort it. And they are serious about the grunt: this is a video tour of their first container farm.

In comparison it is tempting but there will always be limitations. In abdicating responsibility, you are trusting Google to find everything that you want or need. And Google is pretty good at this. Due to our being very busy (or perhaps slightly lazy) we almost always click on a link near the top of page 1 - when was the last time you scrolled down let alone go looking on page 2 or 22? And it all becomes a bit self referencing. The longer Google is around, the more Google will find the sites that Google put on Page 1.

It doesn't end there. Google brings stuff together but all the joining of the data still has to be done by the reader between the ears. Unless we bite the bullet and head down the OpenGIS path, we will be committing our industry to the lowest common denominator and preventing the real exciting spatial stuff that we all know and love from gaining a foothold.

For many years now the wider geospatial industry has been promoting the importance of metadata yet this is an area that has not really taken off. If OpenGIS is to gain a foothold it will need to have widely available metadata to catalogue. The question is whether OpenGIS becomes the catalyst to finally make significant progress here or will a lack of metadata be a persistant barrier to uptake?